Homage, Coincidence, Or Crazy: Tracking Down Avatar's Terminology

Authors go to great lengths to flesh out the worlds they create for their readers. For sci-fi stories, this often means creating terms for things that don’t exist in real life. Depending on the complexity of the tale, the amount of made up vocabulary can be enough to fill an encyclopedia. It makes a guy wonder where the writers get their ideas.

While playing Avatar I started noticing some terms that seemed all too familiar, terms that also appear in other recent sci-fi video games. Were the designers paying homage to their peers? Are they simple coincidences? Or did I go insane playing too much of this game? You be the judge:

Pandora:
Avatar takes place on a planet named Pandora. Borderlands also takes place on a planet named Pandora. Avatar’s Pandora is full of lush jungles, towering mountains, and floating islands. Borderlands’ Pandora is mainly desert wasteland, but also has fun stuff to do. I prefer Borderlands’ world, but I sure wish it had some of Avatar’s style.

On a side note, one of Saturn’s moons is named Pandora, as is an asteroid named 55 Pandora. There’s also some kind of Greek thing about a lady with a box that has something bad inside. I think it’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s head.

Homage, Coincidence or Crazy: Coincidence – and sci-fi writers have to start coming up with more inventive names for planets.

OPS Halo Station:
In Avatar, the RDA use a holographic projection table that they call a Halo Station. I’m not sure why, as it isn’t shaped like a halo. After some searching, I found it might refer to a Halo interface, an electronic mapping technique that uses rings to highlight off-screen locations, but it doesn’t really look like that in the game. There are also several real life military acronyms that spell Halo, none of which have anything to do with tables. There’s also another sci-fi game named Halo. You might have heard of it.

Homage, Coincidence, or Crazy: Probably just a coincidence.

Banshee:
In Avatar, the Na’vi fly around on alien dragon things called Banshees. Halo also has their own flying Banshees, in the form of Covenant spacecraft. This could be a coincidence, so I looked up a definition for Banshee just to make sure it doesn’t refer to some kind of legendary flying beast. Turns out it’s an old Irish myth of a female creature that portends the death of a person by obnoxious wailing; she’s also known as the “hag of the mist.” It has nothing to do with flying, which made me think I found my first real connection – until I found out about the F2H Banshee, a US military jet from the 1950s. Crap.

Homage, Coincidence, or Crazy: Just another stupid coincidence.

Na’vi:
The Na’vi are the blue-skinned aliens that inhabit Pandora and are at war with the humans. Take out the apostrophe though, and Navi is the fairy that escorts Link around in Ocarina of Time – coincidence?! “Navi” is also a commonly used abbreviation in Japan for “navigation,” which might explain Link’s sparkling little companion, but has nothing to do with these overgrown Smurfs.

Homage, Coincidence, or Crazy: Pure bonkers, for sure.

It seemed my quest to find some solid sci-fi connections was failing, until I stumbled upon the biggest and most conclusive link of them all...

Avatar:
Alas, the biggest homage of them all was hiding in plain sight – I almost didn’t realize that the name of the movie and game, Avatar, is the same as Microsoft’s most beloved creation of all time, the Xbox 360 Avatars! Clearly, these delightful, state of the art creations must have sparked James Cameron’s imagination, leading him to make a 500 million dollar movie to try to recapture in cinematic form the thrill of stepping into an alter ego’s virtual shoes, which gamers are privileged enough to experience every time they boot up their 360. Now that’s sarcasm!

Homage, Coincidence, or Crazy: Homage, obviously!

And now a special bonus: These last two terms are also featured in Avatar, but are completely unique – you won’t be finding these terms in any other video games. The reason for which should soon become obvious.

Pandorapedia:
Pandora has its own encyclopedia, which makes it a Pandorapedia. I see what they’re doing there, but it sounds weird. Maybe it's because it has the word "rape" in the middle of it, but something about Pandorapedia just seems perverted. As in, “A police officer stopped by the house to alert me that a Pandorapedia just moved into the neighborhood.” Couldn’t they have come up with something epic, like the Tome of Unlimited Knowledge? Or something cutting edge, like the Intergalactic User Database of Comprehension?

Unobtainium:
In Avatar, the RDA are trying to mine Pandora for a rare mineral called Unobtainium. It’s called Unobtainium, because it’s hard to obtain. I was seriously going to tear this game a new one for including something so stupid, but it turns out Unobtainium is a term that dates back to at least the 1950s; scientists use it to refer to any kind of material that’s unavailable or impractical to use. In that sense it’s kind of cool. The game’s explanation of the mineral is extremely detailed, going so far as to note that it’s actually called Unobtanium, a spelling change to conform to chemical element naming – even though the game points out that it’s actually a compound, not an element. For the person who wrote this extensive explanation of Unobtainium, I’m sure the term is also synonymous with “girlfriend.”

Are there any more sci-fi clichés you’re tired of seeing pop up in video games? Feel free to air your grievances in the comments section below.